I got a new toy. Not the herbs, but a Sony Ericsson K750i. My P800 was getting old and I heard only good things about the K750i (and I almost got it for free (aka sell-your-soul-for-the-next-2-years-to-your-telco)). Thanks to andreash, adi_b, suls, resmo, stefan and sandro for the recommendations :)

Can't complain about its feature set until now, it has almost everything one needs (and a lot of stuff you never need), except UMTS, but my provider doesn't even provide that yet...

It also seems to work very well with my Mac, at least the synchronization part and after a quick hack, I can now also send SMS directly from Address Book via Bluetooth. The only pitfall with this is, that you have no idea if the SMS was actually sent.. No confirmation, no outbox, nothing...

And there's the 2 Megapixel Cam. I'm not that much into phone-cams (anymore), but it's a vast improvement over the shitty cam in the P800. The quality still doesn't compare to any real digicam. Even my approx. 4 years old Canon S10 produces better pictures (it's also 2MP). And while it's ok and reasonable in broad daylight, it's not that good under not so decent light conditions (noisy, sometimes strange lines, etc).

The above picture was taken this afternoon and scaled down to 640x480 before sending via email. The original full 2MB picture is available here.

And there we come to another issue with those 2MP pictures, the full 2 MP picture is 500 kB big (it's with "fine quality", "normal quality" would make it about 350 kB), so sending that via email over GPRS would cost me about 2.30 CHF ( 1 CHF = 0.63 € = 0.77 US $, do your own math) and I have a cheap GPRS plan, others (most people) would pay 6-12 CHF with their standard schemes (depending on provider etc). For just one picture... That's ridiculous and doesn't help bringing a breakthrough to decent moblogging a lot.

But fortunately I can resize the picture just before sending it via mail directly on the phone to 640x480 (no other size options available). This brings the size down to 56 kB and approx. 0.25 CHF (for me), which is not much more than a normal text-message. And as said, at least the picture quality is a looot better than with the P800 before (same size). And I can still upload the large picture later to my mac via Bluetooth or the included USB cable (which makes the phone a standard "hard drive" in the finder, something which Canon still is not able to do till today...)

PS. Taking pictures of your balcony seems to be a common thing people do with their cam for the first time :)

PPS. The thing on the right is not an american flag :)

PPPS. I'll try to make some more pictures and moblog them in the next few days.

Stefan Bucher @ 25.09.2005 18:48 CEST
The picture looks quite similar to my first shot with the same camera phone:
http://www.stefanbucher.net/blog/589
:-)

Dante @ 25.09.2005 20:43 CEST
Is that an American flag?

leu @ 25.09.2005 21:31 CEST
die Qualität der Bilder vom K750i ist wirklich fein, und ich freu mich immer wieder dass ich nun ne schnappschuss kamera dabeihabe. Speziell ist der Makromodus, der sehr warme Farben in den Bildern gibt. Ich denke das macht der CMOS Sensor. :-)

Alain @ 25.09.2005 23:13 CEST
Ich find die Bildchen des Telefons schon recht beeindruckend. Aber hast schon recht, meine 2.2megapix Digicam (IXUS irgenwas) macht schon noch bessere. Aber dennoch. Das du die vor dem senden verkleinern kannst ist auch nett, das kann mein doofes Vodafon nicht.

chregu @ 25.09.2005 23:50 CEST
Eh jo, die Fotos sind um Welten besser, als das was ich bis jetzt hatte und erstmals auch einigermassen brauchbar. Aber eben immer noch kein Ersatz für echte Digicams. Auslösezeiten, (nicht vorhandener) Zoom und schlechte Lichtempfindlichkeit sind nur so drei Beispielpunkte. Aber als immer-dabei-hab "Schnappschuss"-Cam sicher ne gute Wahl.

Und ich werde sie in den nächsten Tagen noch bei unglücklicheren Lichtverhältnissen testen, mal schauen was dabei rauskommt.

Aber das mit dem HighQualityAndPixelGeil-Mobloggen bleibt unverschämt teuer :)

Sandro @ 26.09.2005 11:31 CEST
Check unbedingt ob du die neuste Soft drauf hast, habe mein k750i neulich wegen Joystickproblemen in den Service gegeben, die haben dort anscheinend die Firmware aktualisiert, seit da ist das "OS" um Faktor 2 schneller... Die Auslöseverzögerung ist davon leider nicht "betroffen". Gruss Sandro

chregu @ 26.09.2005 11:35 CEST
Ich scheine die neuste Version schon zu haben (R1L002). Kommt mir auch nicht wirklich langsam vor, das Ganze. Danke trotzdem für den Tip.